


Get the News I Need on the Weather Report (Black Snake, Bleeding Heart)

by TF Grognon (gloss)



Category: Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Drug Use, Dystopia, End of the World, M/M, MKUltra, NoDAPL, Nudity, awful bigots being awful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:55:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/TF%20Grognon
Summary: Two old men at Thursday night poker night as the world continues on to hell in a handbasket.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Juanita_Rainbow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juanita_Rainbow/gifts).



> Title from Simon & Garfunkel, "The Only Living Boy in New York"; subtitle with apologies to the great Tom King.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is fiction. None of the interpersonal details happened or will happen. (Most of the ecological details, however, are true.)

> _"Wait, wait," says Coyote. "When's my turn?"_  
>  _"Coyotes don't get a turn," I says._  
>  _"In a democracy, everyone gets a turn," says Coyote._  
>  _"Nonsense," I says. "In a democracy, only people who can afford it get a turn."_  
>  _"How about half a turn?" says Coyote._  
>  _"Sit down," I says. "We got to tell this story again."_ \- Thomas King, **Green Grass, Running Water**  
> 

  


> _More than anything, I believe that we've got to bring those people together and articulate the real reality of America -- **not the TV reality**. We've got to make people understand that the enormous problems that they are facing are not primarily personal problems, but social problems._ \- [Bernie Sanders](http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/sanders101116.html), meeting of the National Committee for Independent Political Action, New York City, June 22, 1989

###    
next Thursday night

New York is sinking.

(The whole damn East Coast, actually, but who gives a fuck about Boston, let alone Baltimore and DC?)

The harbor is expanding, sloshing up and claiming blocks at a time. If a building's tall enough, some remain occupied, though these are sinking, too.

Something broke a while back. After the snake swallowed Lake Oahe, the disasters started coming faster, more numerous, cascading together. Catastrophacceleration, some call it. 

Hell in a hand basket, right down the express track, in other words.

Thousands of snow geese thunder overhead, a riot of white and ivory wings, honking beaks. The wink of black on the tips of their wings passes for glimpses of the night sky through clouds. Finding their usual lake frozen over earlier than usual, the flock veers southeast in search of open water.

The mine's been closed for nearly three decades, but it will be another three, maybe thirteen, millennia before it can be approached without gut-punching fear. Uranium and copper were clawed out of the rock, and when they ran out, the open pit left as it was. Full now with runoff and rain, gone the precise shade of a three-day old scab -- rust and scarlet, roiling - the site is poison. Gouged into the ground, slopping full of toxic stew, it's no lake but a hell mouth.

Lights and noisemakers warn most of the geese away. Hundreds take their chances, however, and land on the bloody bile. They die within hours, legs suppurating to the bone, beaks melted off, faces caught in horror, stained the red of death.

2000 miles away, the third storm of the new season swamps yet more of DC. Lincoln teeters on his seat, looking out over sludge and acres of silt that, from the air, resemble crimped taffeta on a quinceañera dress. The Vietnam memorial is a path these days, reliably dry amid unpredictable tides and storm surges. Rafts lashed to its granite walls house entire families and crowded market stalls.

It was little Barron's idea to move the capital of what remains of the country back to New York City. He didn't miss his daddy. Nothing like that. 

He was simply very excited to learn that for brief time after the first war of independence, his hometown had ruled the country. His dad was suitably impressed; _Barron's outdoing leading historians_ , you know, _he's the new Lin-Manuel Miranda. New Fukuyama. Knows what's going on and what mattered back then. He **gets** it, gets what people want._

Barron and his mom have long since disappeared. Some say she went back to Slovenia, where she's running a ski lodge-cum-day spa. Others, more optimistic, maintain that she headed west to join the JJ Abrams reboot of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

No one who's anyone, who's not a schmuck or a loser, really gives a fuck where she went. 

What matters is that the seat of political power -- such as it is, these days -- is back where it belongs, in the city that never sleeps, the throbbing pulsing heart of the world, home of the biggest, hugest, best things on earth.

New York.

*

They release Bernie with a warning: behave, and we might consider trusting you again.

He nods as he zips up his windbreaker. He looks like any old dude, in a ratty gray crewneck sweater and flannel-lined Bean corduroy trousers, duck boots daubed with rubber cement where the seams were giving way. He gets colder more easily these days, what with all this damp all the time.

He probably shouldn't have gone to the old neighborhood, but once he crossed the barricades into the Free City of Brooklyn, he couldn't help himself. Fact-finding missions have always been his favorite. Well before he'd ever heard the term, Bernie loved getting to visit a place and learn everything about it. Entering politics just formalized the experience and granted him the opportunity to do much more of it, on a far grander scale.

He hasn't been back to Midwood in years. Like something migratory, bird or salmon, one of those lost species, he found himself drawn home. He searched out hints of memory, angles of architecture that might stir something long-forgotten. He was never quite certain if he'd found a real memory or just the space for one, a space he wished he could feel.

They'd let him into their territory, of course, so they could, when his walkabout was rounding down, bring him in. He gets that now. That's why it was so easy to get in and walk around.

They release him at the foot of the Third Street Bridge. The ripe, terrifying scent of the Gowanus Canal is impossible to escape, even in tonight's drizzling rain.

Things -- situations, loyalties, connections -- are always clearer in hindsight. He finds that very frustrating, to be perfectly honest. _Now_ , as he pauses halfway across the bridge, he can see what they meant to do from the beginning. Get him in, bring him around, release him so he can get to work. Do their bidding..

"Communists have saved the world before," he was reminded.

They certainly have. Communists liberated Auschwitz, then took Berlin just months later. Forty years after that, it was a Communist, Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, who did not believe the reports that there were ICBMs heading his way. He chose instead to believe in the essential goodness of humanity and not respond in kind. In the process, he proved his faith right: He produced the situation he'd imagined. Communists battled, and defeated, both apartheid and Ebola.

Of course, Bernie isn't a Communist. He never was. He has taken pains for _decades_ to make that point perfectly clear. It's neither a point of honor, nor of pedantry, but something much deeper with him. An instinct, almost vestigially stubborn, that he is driven to voice whenever possible.

The wind kicks up as he crosses the span. On the banks, a father and child pull in a net from the canal's depths. Sewage streams out as they open the net; several jellyfish writhe, their tentacles reaching blindly. Transparent, they're only visible as patches of sheen, billows across the background, transforming reality with a shiver of texture.

The tidal inlet was here once, shallower than the canal, but far more complex, branching through tall grasses and silted-soft banks. That wetland murmured with the tides' rhythm, shifting from freshwater to salt and back again over the course of the day and night. It supported enormous oysters that, sent back by Dutch settlers, astonished Europe with their size and strong, sweet flavor. 

The oysters are long gone. They've been lost since before Bernie was born.

The last whale died three years ago, set upon in Upper new York Bay by a swarm of jellies. The jellies clog the Hudson well past the old salt point, all the way to Albany.

Several have been spotted in the Champlain Canal. They're making their way to the lake, to Burlington.

They're in for a surprise. Nothing, it should be noted, that they probably can't handle. Jellies flourish in acid, love PCBs and extreme temperatures. They might just love what they find.

"No good," the father says and the kid, wrapped up in layers of slickers and garbage bags against the rain, kicks the nearest jelly before they push the monsters back into the water.

Jellies are no source of food, unless you're another jelly, the cannibal rogues who consume others' stings to add to their own arsenal.

On the far side of the bridge, a car horn sounds. Bernie hurries onward, hands driven deep into the pockets of his windbreaker.

The old-style Bentley is dull gold, a sickening sight in this, or any other, neighborhood.

"He's waiting," a voice says from the depths of the interior.

Bernie gets into the car and tips his head back against the soft velvet upholstery, closing his eyes. "I got detained."

###    
March, 1978

Roy Cohn's tan is jaundiced under the disco lights, but it seems to flush darker yet whenever Donald speaks.

They're cold, their noses numb from the coke, the antic glittery chaos of Studio 54 their natural environment. Here, it's chrome and chips of mirror and strobe lights: surfaces that glint and refer to other hard, unyielding fragments.

The music is so loud that every attempt at communication becomes a pantomime. That's fine. Neither of them is much for listening. This place is heaven for the performer, for the one who needs to be watched.

Although their closeness surprises, even confounds, their other acquaintances, there isn't much to wonder at. Theirs is a gimcrack relationship. It might look like the real thing -- there is proximity in time and space, a lot of smiles and private meals, constant gifts, but it's a flimsy imitation of what others have. Neither is capable of more. 

What they have is _sui generis_. It isn't father-son; nor is it any of the vast number of ways people organize being lovers. No one else would _want_ what they have, so for all its rarity, it's also, technically, worthless. 

Glitter sparkles in their hair, down their lapels, clings to the sweat on their faces. On Donald's other side, Ivana is helplessly laughing at something a Warhol superstar mispronounced. 

Some ugly plastic electronic toy is being debuted tonight, all flashing lights and hollow chords. Nothing, Roy knows, like a good Lionel set back in the day. Whole world's going to hell, he likes to say, thanks to the motley crew of anti-American anti-social elements. Whoever heard of adults playing a kid's game, for Christ's sake?

"Washroom," Roy mouths and Donald nods amiably, not understanding. Roy points to the side, past the dance floor. " _Now_."

Four more lines in the stall and Donald's kissing him like it's a medical procedure.

"Take it out," Roy says, keeping his eyes half-closed. Blurring his vision just enough that the man before him could be Schine, or Tab Hunter, that beautiful liberal prick Redford. Tall, red-blond hair, perfect male specimen. _Who_ it is doesn't matter, that's for fools and idiots to concern themselves with.

A whine that breaks into a shiver and snot-riddled sniff. "Aw, c'mon --"

"Show me." Roy grabs his own crotch and waits to be obeyed.

Donald's tumescent penis is flushed and thick. Nothing to write home about; if anything, his stubby fingers probably make it look larger than it really is. 

"Drop it," Roy says next, and points at the floor. 

Donald takes too long to comply, loath to let go of himself. He pumps his shaft a couple times, eyes lowered like a teenager.

"Fucking cretin --" Roy says, voice low and raspy, somehow perfectly menacing despite the disco throb surrounding them. "You want to play games? Play a little baby game with me? 'cause I'll beat you. Every fucking time."

After another moment, Donald rolls his eyes and sinks to his knees, pressing his hands flat on his thighs. His dick pokes up out of his fly like some kind of weather instrument.

Roy finishes quickly. The kid enjoys his work, that much is true. There's a rough enthusiasm, a vulgar hunger, that speaks right to that empty, rubble-strewn space in Roy where lesser men's souls are lodged. He pushes fast into the kid's throat, no warning, and comes harder, fingers twisting that bright hair, when Donald chokes and splutters.

Afterward, Donald always has trouble meeting Roy's eyes. Tonight's no exception.

"Do you feel ashamed? That's on you, kiddo. That's all on you. You take what other people -- losers, schnorrers -- think and make it true? Let it be true? Your fault."

Donald nods, taking that in. It's the sort of truth he must have always suspected, because it sinks right into his mind, through his consciousness, down into the sticky tangle of glia and spark.

"You do what you want," Roy tells him and pats his smooth cheek, ruffles up his bright gold hair. "Fuck the rest of 'em. They don't get to tell you anything."

"That's right," Donald says, following Roy to the sinks, waiting his turn to wash up.

"You hear what the fucking PLO fedayeen did the other day? Mowed down a buncha tourists, rat-a-tat- _tat_ and what do the Jews do? Kill some to even the score." Roy shakes the water off his hands primly, then grins into the mirror over the sink. Shows his teeth. "Either they got it all figured out or they're just going to kill each other off, save us the trouble."

Roy himself is Jewish, but Donald knows that's irrelevant and doesn't point out. Roy could be said to be a lot of things, but he gets to decide which ones count and which ones don't. Donald shoots his own cuffs, makes the cufflinks catch the light and glint, and waits.

"Bomb 'em down to glass, sheets of fucking glass." Palm down, Roy sweeps his hand out laterally. "That's what I say. See how they like it _then_."

"Can you do that?"

Roy's upper lip lifts and curls. Any challenge, however hypothetical and abstracted, gets his blood right up. "Ask me that again."

Donald passes a protective hand over his hair. "I meant, Christ, give me a break. Meant, would glass be what you ended up with?"

"What do I look like, some kinda industrial fucking chemist? Heat and sand, that makes glass, all I know."

"Huh," Donald says, his eyes narrowing and lips pursing as his tongue clicks abacus-fast. After a moment, he makes eye contact again. "Large-scale custom marble production. Could be huge. Small outlay in cheap limestone, detonators, and..."

Roy claps him on the shoulder. "Dream big, sonny-boy."

*

Five and a half hours north by the interstate, you get to Burlington after crossing Lake Champlain.

Champlain rests between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, stretched out and luxuriating in her fullness. She glitters under the sun, her depths replete with waving plants and snub-nosed quicksilver fish. To the north, she licks up into the St. Lawrence, kissing it via the Richelieu river; to the south, she has slipped inside the Hudson for over 200 years. It's not a marriage, and certainly isn't exclusive. They, Hudson and Champlain, slosh together over the series of locks, rising higher and higher before tipping gently down to meet her. They rush in the spring and crawl, slush-ridden and shivering, in the winter.

All these names are new; they refer to now-dead Europeans. Singular, significant men.

Water itself doesn't need names. It splits and puddles, flows in torrents or gathers in remote pools, depending on mood and weather. It's all one, freshet and hurricane alike.

That morning Bernie Sanders is roused from whimsical dreams by a ceaseless rapping on his door. 

His macramé sandals slap the floor as he hurries to the front door. The knocking grows louder; he calls, as he tugs a New Riders of the Purple Sage tee over his head, "coming, man, coming --"

The woman banging on his screen door stops. She's dressed like an office manager or high-school teacher, definitely more bourgeois than he's used to. She's dressed in shades of ecru, beige, cream and cocoa, a floppy tie the same fabric as her blouse around her neck.

She smiles at him, rows of bright Chiclet teeth. "You don't remember me, do you?"

He cocks his head, tossing the hair out of his eyes. "I'm sure I would, if we'd..." He pauses, then removes his glasses to polish them on his shirt hem. "Did we?"

She blinks rapidly. "What's your favorite song, Bernie?"

"Ah, jeez, that's a tough one..." He leans against the doorframe, thinking it over. "Been listening a lot to this Scandinavian outfit, ABBA. You heard of them? And there's always Motown, of course, some Temptations, definitely The Supremes, love Miss Ross...."

As he talks on, she tries not to fidget. Finally, when he's digressed into an explanation of the tax troubles currently facing one of Berry Gordy's right-hand men, she places her hand on his forearm and asks, sweetly, "Might I come in?"

"Oh! Oh, gosh, of course, of course, where are my manners?" He holds open the screen door for her, which actually puts him in her way. Shuffling, chuckling, he manages to move aside. "Would you like some...coffee?" He rubs his palms up and down his dungaree'd thighs. "I've got some mate from the co-op, it's better than coffee, so they say. Or some beet juice?"

She heads right for the kitchen, hanging the hard left just through the shivery beaded curtain, her low heels clicking on the hardwood floor.

On the windowsill behind the sink, Bernie has avocado pits speared on toothpicks in various stages of sprouting. She eyes them, then reaches into the correct cabinet for a jam jar that she fills with water and drinks down.

"You sure we didn't...?" he asks, fighting his way through the beads. One strand remains draped over his shoulder like a generalissimo's epaulet.

"You have a very high opinion of yourself," she comments.

"NO, no!" He holds up both hands and shakes his head vehemently. "Far from it!"

"Carefree swinging bachelor lifestyle, eh?" She sets down the jar.

"Goodness," Bernie says, which is neither a confirmation nor a denial.

"Back to music," the woman says, slipping one foot out of her shoe. Her toes wiggle like tadpoles in the darker cap of hose. "That feeling groovy song, remember that?"

"You must've been in nursery school for that one," Bernie says, then hears what a come-on that is and grimaces. "You're young, I mean, very --"

"Who sings that? Simon --"

He nods, and his eyes widen as he slips down the wall to collapse in a soft pile across the cracked linoleum.

She crouches in front of him and snaps her fingers a few times before his face. Having risen, she removes a bulky recording apparatus from her purse. Addressing it, she says, "Subject remains conductive."

She makes herself a sandwich, nose wrinkling at the paltry choices in his fridge (three kinds of hummus, Macedonian yogurt, and something that might once have been celery), eats that while photographing his bookshelves, appointment and address books, the papers on his overloaded desk.

He has $34.71 in his checking account and a past-due notice from the utilities company as well as the water company and Burlington public library. (He is, however, up to date on child support, according to his makeshift accounting.) There's an uncashed check for his educational film distribution company tucked into the hardcover, overdue by five weeks, of Michael Harrington's Twilight of Capitalism, serving as a bookmark. She removes the check and leaves it prominently placed on his desk blotter, a calendar from 1975.

When she has finished, she crouches in front of him again and says, "Simon and Garfunkel? Bernie!"

His hand flutters to his forehead as he blinks awake. He grins, abashed, and pulls himself to his feet, waving off her help. "Took a false step, I guess. This floor, it'll get you every time, ass over kishke, _boom_."

He blames himself for everything, takes everything personally. She'll make a note of that in her report.

"I should be going," she tells him.

"Aw," he replies hollowly. "But I still don't know who you are. How can I help you?"

"Just keep on keeping on," she says and goes up on tiptoe to peck his stubbly cheek. "Peace."

"Peace," he echoes as she disappears around the corner and back out of his life.

*

He doesn't remember meeting her six years ago, when his then-girlfriend took him to a house party in Montréal. After several misadventures, the two of them ended up in a dingy warren of office suites just off the McGill University campus. 

Dosed with neither LSD nor BZ, but some hybrid hallucino-deliriant, they were observed for 100 hours, implanted with trigger words, convinced that Communism will never come to US soil, and sent on their merry way, none the wiser.

He was not important then. The accident of being tested, however, made him potentially useful. Who knows where he might have gone in life, had he been left alone up there on Champlain's placid shores.

###    
next Thursday

Bernie steps off the elevator on the 66th floor. Past presidents lived in the White House; this one rules from the Gilt Abyss.

Though the chaos of the past years have taken their toll, Ivanka remains a beautiful woman. If anyone were to ask him, Bernie would assert that in fact she is prettier now that she's a bit older, weathered, _settled_.

No one has asked him, except her father, in a variety of remarkably lewd and candid ways.

"Work will still be there in the morning," Bernie says as he approaches her desk.

She smiles at him, an expression that reminds him sharply, suddenly, of the women of his mother's generation. There's a tiredness there, hovering around the fond indulgence. Beneath it all, the resigned certainty that all that they do, that she does, will never be recognized, let alone acknowledged and repaid.

"He's waiting for you," she says and pauses to rub her temple. "No one else showed." She glances out the window, where the constant rain sifts down. "Bad weather, I suppose."

"Spearmint oil," he suggests. "A daub here --" He taps his own temple, then the other. "-- and here, it'll do wonders. Migraine, tension headaches, some --" He raises one hand, about to show her the acupressure spot on the meat of one's thumb.

"Thanks," Ivanka replies, but she's already back at work, sliding open a third display and sitting up perfectly straight, taking in the information.

Dwarfed by excretions of gold and custom pink marble, Bernie keeps to one side of the massive hall. He tries very hard not to rush; the first time he was here, the president accused him of "scuttling like a Section-8 roach".

The Thursday night poker games are incredibly prestigious, big league honor to get into. Donald has Kanye, Coulter has T-Swift, Rubio brings Pitbull, and so on.

Bernie's the only one who comes stag. Donald couldn't quite understand why, or how. _Someone big, someone important,_ he'd said, _you gotta know someone like that._

The only celebrity Bernie knew who might have been interested was Killer Mike. Getting him up here from Georgia would be another huge pain, but Bernie had to ask.

"Are you kidding me? I was supposed to be your Sister Souljah! With a happier ending, that is. Now I'm set to be, what? Your Alfonso Ribeiro? No way, no how. No thanks, man, no thanks."

Bernie didn't get the references, but he grasped Mike's overall point just fine.

"I don't sidekick," Mike added. "Especially not in the company of a tokenizing piece of shit apoca-fascist."

Bernie pinched the bridge of his nose. "Understood, understood."

"Him," Mike said, and then came the rumble-scratch as he shifted the phone to his other ear. "Not you."

"Got it," Bernie said. This call was a mistake.

"You're just a wanna-be kapo quisling," Mike said and maybe that was a joke but probably not. "No offense."

"None taken," Bernie assured him and meant every word.

"Who the fuck let you in? Look like Mr. Rogers' poor cousin." Donald is reclining on a Louis the something-th chaise, naked, while the plasma gel that forms his hair sets under a UV light. 

Bernie shakes the rain off his jacket, spattering the marble floor, before hanging it over the back of a gilt chair. "'Senator' still means something, I suppose."

Donald tests the hair mold with his pinky finger. Dissatisfied with its bounceback, he dials up the light, closing his eyes against the glare. 

Bernie grabs himself a can of beer and takes a seat. 

The lamp buzzes, a sound similar to chuckling, as if it's telling itself jokes.

Donald's body is an expanse of soft orange mounds, from his well-padded jaw down over pert little breasts, ziggurat'ed folds of belly, and onward to swollen legs and pancake-round feet studded with curling little blaze-orange toes.

Bernie saw plenty of skin, in all sorts of gender configurations, in the 60s and 70s. He's not about to get fussed now.

This could be an Emperor's New Clothes set-up, Bernie thought the first time he visited. He has come to believe, instead, that Donald does this, like he does everything, because he can. Because he wants to, because he likes wrong-footing everyone else. Because he's revolting, repulsive. Revanchist. Reactionary.

When the hair is finished setting and Donald opens his eyes, he finds Bernie shirtless, nursing his beer. His white hair stands out like a halo around his scowling face. The hair on his chest is whiter yet, almost snowy.

He's never cold here. If he believed in such things, he'd swear he could almost get a whiff of sulfur.

"How was Brooklyn?" Donald crosses the room, his bare feet squeaking slightly obscenely on the floor, to load his plate from the ever-steaming buffet. 

*

He'd thought Brooklyn was safe. Despite its secession from the States, Brooklyn had still been familiar territory. So far as he knew, it remains one of the last bastions of acceptable leftism, what with the DNC supercomputer housed in Lena Dunham's Brooklyn Heights parlor as well as the hipster coterie running the Democratic Socialists of America out of something called the Chapo Trap House somewhere in the wilds of Williamsburg or Bushwick.

He'd been very, very wrong. The same storm surge that took out chunks of the BQE and Promenade shorted out the computer. What happened to the DSA was, his hosts told him, a lot more difficult to explain. "Infighting and informants" was the short version, everyone informing on everyone else to a variety of local and federal agencies from the NYPD to the FBI and NEA.

In the void left by the DSA, the tankies had risen to take charge. On his walking tour of the old neighborhood, Bernie tried to talk to everyone he met. No one had any serious complaints; little had changed, though food and work were more reliable these days. He assumed they were lying. No doubt they were cowed by omnipresent surveillance and pervasive suspicion that turned neighbor against neighbor.

They laughed at him. The NSA couldn't do jackshit here in Brooklyn. Informants were easy to spot and neutralize.

"You, for instance," the voice in his holding cell told him. "You just show up and ask questions and expect to get away with it?"

"I'm a United States senator!" 

They laughed at him. That was fine, it _was_ pretty funny, all things considered.

"And when's the last time Congress met? Been prorogued longer than his original term was supposed to last."

"Yeah, all right, fair enough," he replied. "Who the hell do you people think you are, though? Stasi gulag tactics here!"

"You trespassed on sovereign territory and questioned our citizens," they said mildly. "Should that not be addressed?"

"Orwellian," he muttered and raked one hand through his hair. He wasn't cuffed to the table, simply left here and addressed from nowhere in particular.

"He was a collaborator, too, or have you forgotten that?"

"He was..." Bernie sagged in the chair. "It's an expression, for Christ's sake. Means something else, not necessarily --"

"Like 'socialism'?"

"What?"

"Your socialism," they said. "Your debilitated cartoon communism."

"Not communism! We need social solutions to real problems," he heard himself say by rote. "And real solutions to social..."

"You caricature Communism in order to gain acceptance and access to power, but for what? What have you accomplished?"

The loud speaker buzzed slightly when they had finished speaking.

He opened his mouth. Worked his jaw.

Jane used to ask him exactly the same thing. What did he gain, endorsing Clinton? Cozying up to the Dems? _What was missing from your heart that you think **this** will help?_

He had to trust his instincts. He had to believe in what was right.

"You have no reference point any longer, do you?" they asked. Somehow, they sounded quieter. "What's right, what's wrong, it's all run together."

"Maybe it has."

They told him a story then. He vaguely remembered it from childhood; there was a radio drama based on it, maybe a film, too. At the height of the Chinese Civil War, a British sloop went swanning up the Yangtze, like it belonged there, like it could go anywhere it damn well pleased. The PLA disagreed, as did the Yangtze herself. She swelled, raising her banks at the same time she sucked in her waters, so it grounded under fire from the Communists.

For almost three months, the sloop was trapped at various positions on the river, a clear symbol of imperial arrogance and aggression that a people in the process of liberating themselves could not bear.

When the conflict was over, the British, ever oblivious and sentimental to a fault, awarded a medal of bravery to the ship's _cat_ for keeping up morale and sustaining singed whiskers from shelling.

"I remember this!" Bernie pounded a fist on the table. "Cute little tux he was, name of --"

"Simon, Bernie. It was Simon."

*

"Red Brooklyn, of course you couldn't stay away." At the buffet, Donald stuffs a (tofu) pup in blanket into his mouth but keeps talking as he heads back to the chaise. "Of course I know where you were. Make it a point to stay informed and up to date, you have to know that."

"I didn't say anything," Bernie says mildly. He finishes off his beer and drops the can on the floor as he leans over to grab a wedge of kidney pie from Donald's plate. He frowns as he chews. "Shitty crust."

"Excellent crust! As if you'd know good crust. Best crust, I know exactly how I like it."

Bernie circles his hand impatiently, so Donald trails off. He isn't _happy_ about it, but, eventually, he goes quiet.

"What're we doing?" Bernie asks after a bit. There are crumbs on his chin, across his chest hair.

"Not playing poker, I can tell you that much," Donald says. "Just you and me. Weather."

Bernie snorts. "Good one." He brushes off his hands and sits forward. "You know what I meant. What're we doing? You and me, this whole --" His hand circles again. "Affair."

Donald sneers, flinging himself backward as if in shock and consternation. "Affair? Why, Bernard, I never knew you --"

"Zip it," Bernie says. "All right? Just zip it."

"You're testy tonight."

"I'm a cranky guy, what can I say?"

"Crank is right," Donald says. They're quiet for a long stretch, chewing and drinking. Eventually, Donald asks, "You still on that committee?"

Covering his eyes with one hand, Bernie asks, "Which one?"

"Bleeding-heart do-gooder pinko one."

Bernie grins for half a moment. "Need to be more specific."

"Refugees and migrants from the --" Donald clears his throat and raises his voice a little. "Prairie Redevelopment Zone."

"Yes," Bernie says, sighing. "Standing Rock survivors. Yes."

"Have the chair call Ivanka, maybe she can do something for them."

"She can do everything for them," Bernie says. "So can you. could've prevented this whole --" there goes his hand again, widdershins this time. "Affair."

"Me?" Donald asks in mock-surprise. "I think you overestimate what one man can do --"

"Always did, probably always will." Bernie rises to his feet, takes half a moment to find his balance. Hesitating for a moment, he looks lost, his fingers twitching at his side. He approaches the window, looks down over Manhattan and Jersey. The river trembles in the dark, striped here and there with ambient light, like paper crumpled, then smoothed hastily back out. 

"What about you? Pipeline gave you some trouble, too, it's not like I'm unique in that, not like it's my fucking fault, there are engineering issues to consider, structural integrity, and that's not my bag, those are _details_ , you understand, and once Obama didn't say anything about that goddamn Indian reservation, you can't expect me to be responsible. You think I'm responsible, maybe you should've said something then."

"I did say something," Bernie says.

"Ten years, Bernie, you didn't say a fucking goddamn word about that Vermont pipeline. Not a peep, not from saint Sanders, so you tell me --"

He could cry, he could protest. He's done both, and more, since the gas started spilling. 

Weary of his limited options, Bernie changes the subject. "You hear about the snow geese?"

"What's that, NFL? WNBA? Soccer."

"All of the above," Bernie says. He's reflected against the dark, suspended over the frantic lights of the city below. from up here, very little will have changed. Up here, you're like a god, some mid-ranking angel. Time, pain, history, all that is of little consequence, just more soundbites and clips for entertainment. It's all so far down.

"What about you?" Donald asks, joining him at the window.

Two old men watching the world, and its wreckage.

"What about me?" 

"What're you doing, in this affair?" 

Bernie doesn't have an answer. 

Donald snickers, the sound low and mean, private, before adding, "They're not taking you back."

"Who's that?" Bernie crosses his arms over his chest and keeps looking out into the dark. 

_Maybe I got a thing for old Jews, what do you think of that?_ Donald had said the first time they ended up like this. George, Roy, who knows how many else. Ed Koch, maybe. 

Bernie had tried not to laugh; tried, and failed. "I was five when you were born!"

"You're old because you let yourself go. Acquiesced to the inevitable. Me, I never will. Never going to spend all my energy, never run low. Never."

"Mortality's for lesser people, that it?"

"Schmucks and losers, Bernard, proles and plebes." He winked outrageously and let the tip of his tongue flicker over his lip. "You know, your kind of people."

Bernie doesn't have any people, not any more, not now that Champlain's boiling. No one to take him back, not that they would.

"I'm supposed to do the right thing," Bernie says now, never looking away from the window. Their faces commingle in the reflection, his left ear and white hair, Donald's right ear, sagging orange cheek, perfect arc of extruded hair. "That's all I've ever wanted to do."

"Sweet, sweet, that's just the sweetest thing," Donald replies. "You aim low, you're gonna hit the target every time. Me, I like a challenge, the greatest challenges. I'm all about that, about reaching up, grabbing --"

"I know. Believe me, I --"

"Fear's gonna kill you," Donald says and squeezes Bernie's shoulder. "It's a goddamn toxin, it's poison, it's --"

"PCBs."

"Sure, sure, the worst kind of shit, just Love Canal-level shit, nastiest in the world. Nothing China's got can beat the levels up there, it's just going to get worse and worse. Sad, it's just so sad."

He _is_ scared; Donald's not wrong about that. He's scared, and tired, and lonely. The warmth up here, Donald's arm around his shoulders, the perfect simplicity of it all, is hard to resist. An animal comfort, really, body heat and shared rhythms of breathing. Rats nosing against one another, cats dozing in a pile. Jellyfish billowing together through dead water.

They told him what to do. His mission is clear and no one in the world would criticize him.

Kill the man, easy as pie.

No one except Donald, of course. From a certain perspective, isn't that all that matters? One man's life has to be precious, even if it is this man's, perhaps especially this man's.

Bernie's getting confused. His sinuses throb and his chest tightens; he doesn't know what he's supposed to do. He's not sure what he believes any longer. Did he ever believe very much at all?

"You're not alone," Donald whispers. His accent's so much like home, and he's so close, and _warm_. It's easier -- simpler, more direct -- to see one person and forget about everything else. Disregard how high up they are, forget every scale in between, blink away corpses and warheads, ruptures and toxins.

"Kiss me," Bernie tells him and Donald does and the rain keeps weeping on down.

**Author's Note:**

> Whatever this story managed to become, I am indebted for challenge and inspiration to these efforts by others: Kate Schapira's [Climate Anxiety Counseling](https://climateanxietycounseling.wordpress.com/about/); [@cuttlefish_btc](https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc)'s research on MK-ULTRA and earlier forays into mind control, including HD's description of the jellyfish-as-overmind; and Amitav Ghosh's study, The Great Derangement (2016).


End file.
